Glass Armor
by Candlefly
Summary: The Doctor has screwed up gravely. A mistake and a moment of bad judgement leaves the Doctor irreversibly separated from Rose and the TARDIS by 48 years. Caught alone, he has suffered at enemy hands. Rose struggles to find him on a trail 48 years cold.
1. Caged

Caged

The chains. The stone cage. The diadem made of steel and blinking light that was heaviest of all, on his brow. They might have broken his mind already with their weight had the diadem not restrained and sealed away most of his thoughts.

He sat on the stone floor. Outside, through the bars of his cage, he could see the sky. He could see the end of the rock floor, past the bars, where the world--impossibly small to him now--dropped away into the blueness. Bits of grass grew just in front of him. Wild onions grew as well, and he had had just enough intellect left that he made an effort to nurture the wild onions. Replanting the bulbs, spreading them wide on any soil where they would grow. Some of them inevitably grew out of his reach, but he could still put his arms through the bars and pull the onions to eat.

Birds flew by too. He could not see the ocean, but he could smell it. He heard the crash of waves on rock. He heard the cries of seagulls. They fed and hatched somewhere nearby, somewhere he couldn't see, but they flew by the cave that caged him in noisy, messy flocks.

Long ago, he had dug and pulled out his chains from the walls. They were still attached to him, hanging from his neck and his thin wrists and ankles. He used the ends of his chains to catch sea birds. He had gotten good at throwing out the chain and using the end to stun or loop around the body of a bird flying too closely to his prison. He killed them quickly and ate their flesh. He saved their feathers and bones for when there were times he thought of uses for them.

But he couldn't do much thinking. The diadem saw to that.

He remembered the planet was Earth. The year wouldn't come to him. He couldn't think of any landmarks or people or the way they had dressed before he had been put in here. It had simply been too long for him to recall. He also didn't know how long he had been in the stone cage. Not knowing the time still frightened him, sometimes. Even after all of these years.

He knew, in the beginning, he still remembered lots of things. He was old, he knew. He looked young, but he had lived a long time. He had so many memories. There were so many faces. So many places in his mind. But they began to slip away, flowing out unevenly like clouds across the only thing he could see outside, the sky.

Using the bones of the birds he caught, he tried to write things down. He sharpened the thin, light bird bones against the jagged stones of the floor of his prison and scratched words and names on the walls and floor.

The diadem was not tech of earth, although it had been made from materials found on the planet. It was made of native steel. The blinking lights had been encased in glass bubbles once, but he had smashed most of those bubbles in an attempt to move the hellish bit of metal encircling his head. It was like the chains and the cage, but it was more. It crippled him. He was supposed to be clever. He was supposed to be brilliant, he knew that. That, he could not forget. Because it was a part of his sense of self. Had it not been for the diadem, he would have gotten out of the stone cage a long, long, long time ago.

But someone--he couldn't remember who--but someone had known he was clever. Someone had caged him. Someone, he could remember in vague outline surrounded by other vague outlines, had wanted something. He couldn't remember what.

He remembered needing to run. He remembered that, oh, so well. He knew there was supposed to be a safe place.

A box. He had drawn it with a sharpened bone and loving hands. He loved the box. The box was his home. In as legible a hand as he could managed when writing on stone, he had written TARDIS above his drawing. First in Gallifreyan and then below he had written in simple block Latin letters. He liked Latin characters. He liked the English language. So messy and imprecise, English, but there were so many wonderful words, so many ways to say all that needed to be said…

…so many words, and no thoughts to put them to use.

His TARDIS had not been there when he had needed a safe place to go. He could not remember why, only remembered the sick, sinking horror that it was not where it was supposed to be.

That was incredibly bad. Not just for the simple reasons. He was caught eventually, because he was outnumbered and boxed in the area where the TARDIS was supposed to be. He was overpowered and restrained. He was taken to a dark place, where shadows hidden behind bright lights and the thickness of drugs they kept pouring into him kept asking him things. Maybe not even back then, before the diadem, had he really understood exactly what it was that they wanted.

Bad things happened to him there. He was stripped naked early on. He was examined in a cold and cruelly efficient way, many hands that were harsh and grabbing and encased in latex. He was not dressed again, his body completely unprotected as he was beaten by the same interrogators again later.

Then there was a long time of blankness. Next he only remembered how he fought them when they were putting the diadem on. He knew what it was. Knew what it would do to him.

He was crippled. That was the only word for it. His cleverness gone. His thoughts slow and simple. There had once been billions of languages in his mind, and now they were all gone except for the few he had used the most. His head had been awhirl with clusters and mysteries and equations and distance and time and memory, thoughts dancing around propulsion and genetics and philosophy, his entire form and being electrified with the need for movement and an entire universe of space and time that was his playground.

Now the height of his intellect was when he finally worked out a way to sew the feathers he pulled from countless dead birds into blankets to cover himself with when the cold of winter became too much. Yes, such cleverness… He braided grass together to bind the feathers, and sometimes broke off his own hair, which was growing unchecked, to tie together the calamuses, overlapping the feathers to better trap the heat…

It would not have been enough for Rose.

He had been very, very careful not to allow himself to forget Rose. The memory of her was keeping him alive, long, long after the captors had finished with him, had caged him in a cave within a cliff with his very mind in chains and left him to die. He survived. He at first drew her face on the wall of his cave, and over the years had deepened the lines and grooves and curves of the drawing until it began to look out of the wall as a sculpture. He wrote her name. Wrote down things and places that she liked. Scraped onto the stone phrases and words he could remember her voice saying.

It was bad that he had lost the TARDIS. It was bad that he had gotten captured. It was bad he had let those people mess him up. It was bad he had been chained up in a cage for years and years.

It was bad because Rose had been in the TARDIS.

So many years ago…

As incredibly sorry as he was for all of this, he hoped, he _prayed_ with all that he had left that she was all right. She had to be. His one point of solace was that in all this time, she should be safe. There was safety for her in the TARDIS. The TARDIS would look after her. While he sat in this cage, naked and thirsty and starving and shivering in the chill winds that blew off the sea, she would be warm and safe and dry. There were clothes and there was food for her. Books and games and gardens in the many rooms of his ship where she could get the mental stimulation that was denied to him.

She would survive, Rose would.

How long had it been since he had seen her? So very many years. She would be old now. In her late sixties, early seventies, maybe? He could not remember her family, but he remembered that she had one. She would never see them again. And she would never know what had happened to him.

This was all his fault. Why was the TARDIS not where he left her? Why was she gone when he had ran for her, toward the safety inside and Rose with it? Toward the freedom and the home that his trapped mind and shredded spirit longed for?

But it was still his fault. His fault it wasn't there. His fault he lost it. He knew that, but he couldn't remember what it was he had done wrong.

The air was getting so cold. The feather-blankets weren't always enough, and had he not been a being of temperature tolerance he would have frozen to death in winters before long ago. It had not rained in a while. He was always thirsty. In this cold, the onions slept dormant under the soil and the most of the birds departed for warmer climes. He would starve for a long time. His body would force him to sleep a lot in order to preserve what little reserves he had been able to build up during the warmer months. His body had always been slim, but now his unclothed form was sharp with knobs and angles and ribs and collarbone and spine.

He could not get out of the cage. He stubbornly held on to his life, even when the combinations of despair and loneliness and hopelessness and desolation and humiliation slipped from under the constraints of the diadem. He would scream. He would cry, tears falling with moisture he couldn't really afford to lose. He would beat his chains and sometimes his head where the diadem was against the stone bars. He would sob until he barely breathe.

But he kept breathing. He forced himself to endure the fact that another day would come.

Still, he was failing. He knew that in the slow, cumbersome way he now collected information to reach conclusions. His body was failing.

It was not because he wasn't fighting to keep himself alive. No, with little else he could do, he fought everything from his terrible thirst to the elements themselves. It was the stillness and the loneliness that was killing him. It was the fact that he was trapped, caged. His hearts were dying, his soul a trembling, shriveled thing curled up deep inside him.

He could not get free. If his body began to die, he would not regenerate. He had held on for so long, but he could not bear another two or three lifetimes in this stone cage.

He had not spoken in years, but most of what he wanted to say was written on the walls with brittle, inadequate bird bone. Sometimes the words he needed most often he touched, just before he lay down to sleep and escape the ache and the despair and the hunger and thirst and weakness. Most often, his long, grimy fingers touched the words, "I'm sorry, Rose." The words were written only in English, and they were beside the sculpture of her face in the cold stone wall.

He was sorry. So sorry. But he just couldn't free himself.


	2. Forty Eight Years

Forty-Eight Years

When Rose Tyler first realized what the Doctor had done, any calm or composure that she was graced with was shattered.

She was standing by the TARDIS on the streets of Idun, a city of the country of Argonne. Neither the city nor the country existed in her time, though the place was sandwiched somewhere among the many lands of Europe. If Europe was still called Europe, many centuries removed from any familiarity from Rose's time. Newspapers never seemed to change no matter how much time passed, and it was a newspaper Rose clutched in her hands now, crushing the edges in white-knuckled hands.

Forty-eight years. Forty-eight _years_. The date on the newspaper was _forty-eight_ years ahead of the last newspaper she had held in her hands, which, for her, had only been a few minutes ago. Still, a few minutes ago, she had expected the paper to be dated only two days ahead. Forty-eight hours, not forty-eight years.

The Doctor had screwed up gravely.

Trembling with shock, Rose's eyes moved along the street. It was nearing winter, she could see. Two days ago it had been closer to spring. The street had changed a bit, but she still recognized it as the same one. The TARDIS was nestled between ancient brick apartment buildings, covered in shadow where, as the Doctor often said, people would hardly notice it.

She didn't know exactly what she could be expecting. The Doctor, perhaps, walking down the street from the highly-acclaimed Italian restaurant they had visited eight minutes or forty-eight years ago, depending on their perspective points of view. Naturally he wouldn't have aged much. _Maybe_ he would be wearing different clothes and a sheepish look on his face. _Oops_, he might say, just to sum it all up in one word.

Or it might be a lot worse than that. Forty-eight years was a long time. Even for the Doctor. Perhaps especially for the Doctor, who liked every moment to be filled with action and purpose. He would have had to hang around this area for forty-eight years, waiting for the TARDIS to reappear one day…

A lot could happen in a half-century. Maybe one of these people walking from one direction or the other could be the Doctor. Regenerated from whatever accident or trauma he had faced while he had been stranded. Unrecognizable.

Swallowing several times, Rose backed into the TARDIS, shut the door, dropped the newspaper, put her hands over her ears, and shrieked a very bad word.

She lowered herself to her knees and leaned over, taking deep breaths. All right. This was not the first time the Doctor had gotten the flight wrong. This was, however, the first time he had gotten the flight wrong without being on the flight! Of all the stupid--!

A few minutes ago, for Rose, it had been nighttime in Idun. All she and the Doctor wanted was to satisfy an urge for tomato sauce and cheese. The Doctor remembered a wonderful Italian place nestled in a picturesque little city in the country of Argonne. A homey little place, they made their own cheese and grew their own tomatoes and bought beef and sausage locally, he'd described enthusiastically. And the food had been wonderful. Heavenly, a huge pan of steaming, cheesy lasagna shared between the two of them.

Then, a bit of trouble found its way to their ears on threads of the conversation of diners. There was a sickness spreading just on this street, a sickness the Doctor recognized. A virus that didn't belong on this planet, at this time.

"I'll deal with it," he said with a flat firmness and added, "You're not coming with me this time," when she opened her mouth automatically to protest. With a hard expression he said, "Listen to me, Rose. It's in the air. All you'll have to do is breath it, and you'll be bleeding from your mouth, nose, and eyes. Your blood will grower thinner and thinner and will never clot again. You'll bleed to death before my eyes."

She had shut her mouth, and right now, forty-eight years removed from those events, she sat on the floor of the TARDIS. For her, the Doctor had been here only moments ago. And she had understood what he had meant to say with that last sentence.

It was one thing for her to be at his side while they saved lives and fought monsters, but quite another to stupidly risk contacting a deadly and painful disease just to be stubborn.

And still, worse yet, as he stood staring into her eyes to get her promise that she would stay on the ship until he returned, she could now guess clearly what he had been thinking. She had no regard for Rule One. Had blatantly disobeyed him on many occasions. They were friends, partners, even family, and something else, something deep and connected, an entwining kinship for which she had no name. But he was not her boss and in the end, she would do what she liked, whether it was following his lead or doing what _she _thought best.

It was this in his mind, Rose knew, when he suddenly grinned and bounced over to the controls. "I know!" he said. "Perfect solution! No need for you to hang about here, with nothing to do but wait. So!" He dashed around the consol, flicking switches and pressing buttons. "There we are. Two days ought to be enough for me to set things right, and you won't have to wait around here being bored."

Rose blinked. "What?"

The Doctor pointed at a familiar lever. "When I leave, wait a minute or two and then pull this down and back up. I've got everything all put in, not complicated at all. You'll just disappear and then reappear back here, forty-eight hours later."

In all of her time on the TARDIS, he had been trying to teach her the equipment. Some things she understood quickly. The data on the monitors and how to access any information the TARDIS didn't automatically restrict. She helped drive all the time.

But only on the one other occasion had she ever traveled in the TARDIS without him. She had not thought this likely to happen again, and it was unsettling. It wasn't a liberating feeling, like when she was learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car. Because Rose knew, even when she was absorbing what he taught her, it was unlikely she would ever be able to operate the TARDIS. Not just because the technology was well beyond her, there was also the fact that the Doctor often needed to employ a hammer and various contortions and acrobatics to get where he needed to go.

Still, it was a flabbergasting moment, and she agreed. Part of her sort of was nostalgic for the feeling. The same feeling she had gotten when she was learning to ride that bicycle and her mother had let go for the first time.

Besides, perhaps he was right. Better to jump forward a little in time while he stayed behind and dealt with the problem. He was right, there was no sense in her hanging around bored. There was nothing to it. All she had to do was pull a lever.

But now, now, Rose could see something she hadn't thought of before. Now she understood, it wasn't just because the Doctor wanted to spare her a couple of days of boredom. No, it was because he knew her a touch too well. Knew how she would become anxious, worried, while she was waiting for him. That she might step out of those TARDIS doors too soon, go walking the streets looking for him, braving a potentially deadly virus floating in the air. Because she had never, ever proven that she could be trusted to stay where he told her to stay.

He'd made a mistake. Two days had ended up being forty-eight years.

But this wasn't really his fault.

This was all her fault.

Her fault, that he couldn't trust her to stay put. Her fault, that she didn't give him a hug and send him out on his mission with her promise to remain on the TARDIS as he said until he returned. Her fault, for not ignoring that lever and going to take a long bath and relax in her room with a few books from the TARDIS's library. That's what she should have done.

Because she knew, she _knew_ and the Doctor knew that the TARDIS didn't always end up where he meant her to go.

Rose wiped her mouth and stood up. Forty-eight _years_. What should she do? Wait here, hoping he showed up? What if he didn't realize that the TARDIS had shot so far off the mark? What if he thought the police call box had been stolen, carted off--again--and had been running around looking for it? What if he was no longer in the area at all?

Apologizing under her breath to a man who couldn't hear her, Rose darted to her room. She dressed in warm clothes, put on a long coat, and grabbed a pad of note paper when she darted back out to the control room. She would leave the Doctor a note, she decided. In case he got here while she was out.

Scribbling rapidly on the note paper, she first wrote that she was sorry. Then added she wasn't going far, she was just going to ask after him on the street and to please just wait for her if he got back before she did. It wouldn't do if they were both ducking in and out looking for each other.

As Rose stepped out of the TARDIS, she took a deep breath of the clean, cold air, stuffing her hands in her pockets. She felt so lost, and was so glad to at least have the TARDIS for an anchor that she unconsciously patted the doors after closing them. But aside from that, she didn't quite know what to do first. She wanted to ask around, as she said in her note, but would it really be so reasonable to expect people to have seen him? What if he _had_ regenerated, or if time had changed the man she remembered in enough subtle ways that they still wouldn't know the man she was describing as someone they knew?

With no better plan, Rose looking down the street and saw the place that had once been the Italian restaurant the Doctor had liked. It was no longer a restaurant. It was now a law office with the brick repainted white and cream yellow and the windows enlarged. She stared at the reformed establishment for a long time because it was truly proof that, although this was the same place, it was still not really…the same place. It was proof that she was not somehow mistaken, that this was not only the forty-eight hours later that the Doctor had planned for.

Rose swallowed, crushed down her worry, then took a deep breath and stepped out on the street, wishing she had a picture of him to show as she tried to decide where which neighbors to ask first. As she walked, she hoped with all her might to hear his voice behind her. _Wait, Rose. Here I am, come back!_

But he wasn't there.


	3. Hope

* * *

Author's note:

_Frustrating chapter. Wrote three different versions, and although this's not my favorite of the three, it is the one that takes the plot in the direction that I want. The reference to the TARDIS sharing a dream with Rose comes from the BBC_ Doctor Who_ novel "The Nightmare of Black Island."_

* * *

Hope

Had the TARDIS allowed it, Rose Tyler might have ended up walking the streets of Idun for weeks using the same fruitless, ineffectual methods of searching for the Doctor.

Not that the girl's diligence or determination could be faulted. Definitely not. For thirty-six hours since she had scribbled the note to the Doctor and launched herself into the unfamiliar city in search of him, Rose walked her feet off, showing images of the Doctor on her phone to anyone who would look, describing him to anyone who would listen. She drifted to wherever large amounts of people could be found, pubs, hospitals, markets, shops, intersections. She even asked about any strange happenings or natural disasters or explosions or any spectacular and unusual happenings that had occurred in the area at any time in recent memory, knowing that such things could have had the Doctor in the middle of them.

But, nothing. It seemed that Idun, Argonne, was a very dull place. That in itself was disheartening. Unsettling. Because anywhere the Doctor lingered, there was bound to be a memorable incident of interest or two.

When Rose returned to the TARDIS, the old ship predicted her movements to the letter. It was Rose's intention to drink a warm cup of tea to take away the chill of the weather, take a short, hot shower, sleep for just a few hours to get back her strength, and be right back out on the streets. All of this could be told in the simple way her set jaw clashed with her weary footsteps as she first made her way to the kitchens, even if the TARDIS had not grown to know the girl so well.

While Rose sat drinking her tea, the TARDIS began to hum a little more loudly. Just enough to tug at Rose's peripheral awareness. Patiently, the TARDIS waited, keeping up the gentle, persistent tugging.

In the shower, a warm water shower that both Rose and the Doctor seemed to prefer over the alternatives to getting clean such as sonics, the TARDIS deepened the hum just a little more, making the tug at Rose's awareness even stronger.

The girl was almost psi-null, but Rose had just enough empathic ability that once the TARDIS had been able to share a dream with her before. Just barely; as it was, when compared to the Doctor, his mind was like a massive ocean with all the life and movement above and below the surface, and a young woman like Rose was a drop of water. Except, the TARDIS had been watching this drop of water, and this one small, drop was complicated with the trace minerals found within, spectacular with the way she could seem to change into a flake of snow or, most of all, amazing in the way she could merge with the vast ocean the Doctor created and yet still separate herself as her own, individual drop of water.

The TARDIS was exceedingly fond of Rose. More fond of her than maybe any other companion the Doctor had cared for in the past, and more than any of the companions whose shapes could be picked out in the possible futures that she could see.

But the TARDIS loved the Doctor, and she would not trade him for Rose. Rose needed a push in the right direction and besides, there was a terrible pain and fear that the TARDIS was going to share with her. Something that even the endurable old ship did not want to bear alone. Something that would give Rose the push she needed and spur her on.

It was the moment that the TARDIS and Rose had, without the Doctor, disappeared from Idun's little street and reappeared in the same spot forty-eight years later. The moment when the TARDIS, displeased with the unexpected disruption with the bond she shared with him, reached out to brush his mind.

That was what she had to share with Rose.

It might have been easier for the TARDIS to wait until Rose sought out a short nap, but she didn't want this to be a dream this time. Without the Doctor there to realize otherwise, Rose would simply wake up, and believe it was a dream born from her fear and worry and not heed it as a truth the TARDIS was trying to give her. It would have been frustrating and counter-productive. It would have wasted time, and the last of the Time Lords was running out of it.

It had to be done while Rose was awake and aware.

The shower was the best place to begin, as the warm water relaxed her muscles. When her mind began to drift under the soothing sensations of the spray of water, the TARDIS stopped tugging at Rose's mind and gently poured the painful memory she had been holding at ready into Rose's head instead.

The TARDIS's humming took on apologetic notes as Rose sagged against the shower wall, eyes open wide but not seeing the well-lit shower room.

Rose saw darkness. Rose _felt_ the absence of sight, her mind knowing not images, but a memory of minds touching.

The TARDIS's mind, many hours ago, when Rose had been holding the newspaper and receiving her own shock at the date, had met the Doctor's.

It was like he was encased in glass. There was a shield. Something blocking the bond so that the TARDIS could only brush at his warmth.

Yet, it was enough to let him know she was there, and when he tried to touch her back she drew back slightly in horror.

His mind was not the vast, living ocean. It was instead a vast desert with its small points of breathing life tattered by endless, freezing night and harsh, battering winds. His soul had been like a being of light and color, but now it was like a frightened, beaten animal huddling in a swinging gibbet, exposed to the elements but kept out of the light. His spirit and thoughts were fettered, slow, and heavy. His life signs were crushed with weakness and the lack of will.

He felt her, pressing himself against the glasslike block that heavily muted their bond. He had felt her withdraw in her shock, and weakly reached out. Not with the desperation that his frayed and shredded spirit should feel after the impossible stretch of emptiness and isolation and deprivation, but with the well-deep sadness and hurt of a man slowly dying and believing it was only a dream that had come to keep him company.

_Please don't leave me_, he whispered raggedly, and when he reached out the TARDIS knew that he was not reaching out for her. He did not realize she was really there. He was reaching out for madness, for the escape madness would offer, and was restricted by the glass. It had stripped him bare, but also held him together, and the TARDIS's entire being cried out with rage as she slammed her mind against the glass armor, wanting desperately beyond thought to surround his failing spirit with hers, to hold him close and protect him.

This time, she felt _him_ draw back in surprise, felt his shock, and then another shock layering upon the first one as he realized she _was_ real. Then he, weak and trembling, scrabbled at the force keeping them apart, clawing at it with his mind, the desperation that had been missing before growing in him.

_Please don't leave me!_

He cried, his sobs resounding in the heart of the TARDIS, and she sobbed with him.

And so, too, did Rose, kneeling in her shower with the water beating upon her back. The TARDIS withdrew, leaving a soft, trembling song of apology…_I beg your pardon…I beg your pardon…I beg your pardon…_

But deep in her own expansive mind, the TARDIS was not entirely certain whether she was apologizing to the her human or her Time Lord.

* * *

Some time later, Rose walked slowly into the control room. She was awake and dressed now, though her eyes were still red and haunted even after her brief nap.

Rose ran her hand over the consol. "I…" she began, stopped, swallowed slowly. "I was so busy thinkin' about me that I didn't think about how you would be feelin'," she whispered. "God, is that what's…? Can't you tell me where he's…?"

But she stopped, suddenly knowing better. The TARDIS could feel that he was alive and in distress, but of his exact position, that was something else. It was up to Rose to find him and bring him back.

"And I've been goin' about it all the wrong way," Rose murmured aloud, her hand still on the consol. "I've been lookin' in the wrong places. I understand now. I…I think I know what I have to do. At least, I hope it's right."

She picked up the Doctor's coat, left behind because he had not needed it in the comfortable early spring weather when he had first arrived. She pulled it around herself, and it was too long, of course, but it had his familiar, comforting scent on it and it gave her strength and determination.

"I'll bring him home," she promised the TARDIS, and once more she stepped out onto the street. Hiking up the doctor's coat a little so it wouldn't drag on the ground, she turned her steps toward the little place that had once been an Italian restaurant, but was now a law office.

The TARDIS watched her, and saw it was the right direction. She tried to send the feeling to the Doctor through that which blocked their bond, the feeling that someone was searching for him. But she couldn't. She could only make him feel her presence. He clung to the sense of her with all the strength he had left.

He was completely undone. Alternately laughing and crying, feeling both intense joy and deep shame, holding his thin arms across his narrow chest as though he might shake apart if he didn't try to hold himself together. She was frightened that maybe that was exactly what might happen.

But he _held on_. He was holding on with everything he had left.

The hope the cold, dark desert could crash and flow with power and life and light again. His strength. Rose's cleverness. All was lost if it wasn't enough.

So it had to be enough.


	4. Between Two Heartbeats

Author's note:

_I'm sorry for the long delay between updates. Truth told, I've been a wee bit depressed since the announcing of the Eleventh Doctor back in January. True, the braver part of me is the larger part, and I know I'll enjoy what is to come and it will be an adventure rediscovering the Doctor in Matt Smith's style. But...of all the Doctors I have adored Ten most of all (as I have clearly shown in this delightful Doctor-torture story), and I've been sad that David Tennant is stepping down. Still, it's high time I bucked up and got on with the story. After all, that time is still a little while off, and the Tenth Doctor's adventures won't end as long as there is fanfiction to write, neh?_

* * *

Between Two Heartbeats

The Doctor drifted in and out of sleep.

At first, he would panic when he realized that he had slept, then he would reach for the TARDIS and relief would flood him when he found she was still there. Muted, muffled, but there. Then when he realized that she was always going to be there every time he woke up, he let himself drift into painlessness.

To his crippled mind, sometimes the way things were, were the way things were. He could no longer question why or see how things could be different. He had also exhausted himself and advanced his dehydration with his crying and joyful noises. He would sleep. He would sleep, and when he woke up he still wouldn't be free, but he also wouldn't be quite as alone.

The last time he slept, then woke, he actually had a strong half-thought. Half a thought, as in it seemed a finished end that had no beginning in his mind. It also frightened him, somewhat, though he couldn't think of why.

The thought was that somewhere, someone was doing something stupid.

Aside of the fright the little broken thought gave him, there was also another, long-forgotten feeling.

Exasperation.

He lay very still under his feather-blankets, face scrunched as he used the half-idea and the feeling to draw up another idea.

The feelings of exasperation only deepened. But not at himself. He had been the living dead too long to be frustrated or wearied at himself.

No, this was…

There was a second of pure clarity. Not an improvement or a breakthrough from his captive mind, but rather a noticing of something that was familiar and expected, something sharp like an instinct rather than truly a thought, such as the way he knew he should scramble to the bars of his cage when it began to rain so that he could catch the precious moisture on his fingers, or when he had thought to dig two deep holes at the outmost edges of his cage to catch rainwater so that he might save a little to have when it stopped raining.

_Is that my companion doing something stupid_? he asked the TARDIS, except that asking such a "complex" question was painfully difficult. He took the long way about it just to be sure he would be understood. _My companion_, he said, or rather, conveyed with the image and feeling of a warm hand slipping into his own. _Something stupid? _he asked, with several images of Rose doing foolish or silly things that he could still remember from their travels, back when he was free…

The TARDIS could not say anything back to him, but there was a shift in the telepathic exchange, a slight change in her emotion. She was…sheepish. The mental equivalent of him rubbing the back of his head with a nervous laugh.

The Doctor paused for a long moment, trying to consider this. He tried to work things out, and it was in the trying he knew he would fail since he had not been able to work out much in decades. Still, many things didn't make sense. There seemed to be vague feelings and recollections of precisely why it was that Rose could not and should not possibly be doing something stupid right now. A mental picture of what she might look like aged many, many years ahead of the time he had last seen her, and he thought her perhaps to be too frail to be doing alarming things. Yet, this image somehow no longer seemed right. No, it was wrong, and the idea of her being old, he realized suddenly, should be completely discarded because it was not valid…yet.

He pressed his lips together, suddenly irritated and also further exhausted.

_Baaaaaad_! he found himself scolding. _Bad! Bad Time And Relative Dimensions In Space! Bad girl! Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad!_

The feel of the TARDIS changed again, this time wavering in a tremor of laughter. Part of her was still lightly sheepish, but the larger part of her beamed at him.

_Bad girl_, he repeated, but smiled briefly because her laughter was infectious and he had had such little joy for so long.

But it was only a moment and the tiny smile vanished underneath the weight of his chains again. He tried to grasp the thought that Rose should be stopped, kept safe. Tried to grasp the reasons why, to make himself understand. Part of him, the noisier part, wanted his TARDIS to just be nearby while he slipped away into the dark. To hold his hand--so to speak--until she let him go. There was just enough of the link between him that he could probably direct her to initiate emergency protocol one the very moment Rose next stepped through the doors.

The quiet, sad part of him, the part that wasn't even fighting anymore, wanted to be saved.

_Paradox, paradox_, his mind sang lazily, and quite suddenly he forgot what he was worried about. He spent a few short moments grasping for the elusive worry, but it was gone, drifting in smoke and fog. Dehydration was affecting him along with the diadem now. It wouldn't be long now.

Rose. Yes, Rose. Rose was his worry. _Hurry Rose. No. No, Rose, stay away. No, hurry. Hurry… No, stay back. Stay safe. Hurry._

_Leave me. Just leave me. No. No, don't. Don't leave me. Don't…_

The TARDIS increased her muted hum, a soundless but soothing vibration in his head that soothed away the turmoil and drew him back down into sleep, dreamless and protecting.

* * *

It could not be said how the Doctor, who was grimly impaired, seemed to know, but Rose would have in the same moment agreed that she was indeed pulling one of the more idiotic stunts in her life.

She was clinging to the incredibly high cliffs above the beaches of West Burreme, a very small town forty miles from Idun. She knew she was an idiot, because she kept telling herself so, over and over like a mantra to distract herself from the fact that she was _CLINGING_ to a sheer rock wall with nothing below but rocks and crashing ocean. Freezing water below, freezing air all around her. She was wearing a pair of intricate climbing gloves she had bought from a hobby shop. Like slender gauntlets, they were, with ridged claws meant to sink into rock so that she could support herself by her arms when she needed to rest. Yet they were flexible enough to allow her to grab handholds and manipulate the rope she brought with her.

In trying to be fair to herself, she wasn't actually completely stupid. She had spent a childhood and an early youth enjoying climbing and swinging around on ropes when she found opportunities, had enough formal gymnastics training that she wasn't completely a novice and enough awards and small medals that she wasn't entirely untalented. There was also the fact that in her life with the Doctor she often found herself, when not merely running for her life, doing a great deal of clinging and climbing and free-falling, and seldom with handy tools like she had now.

She had also practiced a little before coming out here, on the artificial climbing rocks the hobby shop had in a back room so that customers could test out samples of climbing gear before buying. Interestingly, they had also had a very small skating park back there too.

But this was different, very extreme, and infinitely less comfortable than any climbing experience she had had before. It was the icy wind that was the worst, she decided. She could deal with the torn and skinned knees of her jeans and flesh, with her fatigue and aching muscles, with slightly strained wrists and ankles, with the pulling ache of chapped lips and the wind-stung ears and cheeks and the painful way her own hair whipped her face in the high winds. But it was the cold air coming off the ocean that made the effort so difficult to bear. Beforehand, she had decided it best to be more light and mobile than warm, so she had dressed in jeans, windbreaker, and a wool cap that had fallen off some time earlier, leaving her head bare and her hair free.

Not for the first time, Rose Tyler wished that she were smarter, because only an idiot would be climbing down a cliff alone with no idea of what she was going to find there--if anything--in this kind of cold and not at least think to put on some thermal underwear! Her small backpack was also too heavy. At the time, she had thought she was packing too lightly, but the little metal medical kit borrowed from the TARDIS and a few other odds and ends she thought she might need had started to feel like onerous weights that tried to drag her from the cliff to fall into the churning ocean below.

Rose stopped to rest, digging the metal claws deep into the rock and finding firm footholds to take some of the weight off her arms. She was not afraid of heights in particular, but somehow being in prolonged suspension made her a bit dizzy from time to time. Or maybe it was just the freezing, salty air. Either way, she closed her eyes and pressed her face into her forearm.

What in hell was she doing? She had to be crazy. No one knew that she was here. Usually when attempting such a dangerous task, the sensible thing to do was to have someone along, or at least tell someone what she was doing so that if something went wrong--like falling and breaking her neck or back, or getting caught somehow in a way that she could neither climb up or down--someone would know. There might be hope of rescue. And a chance to try again. As it was, if she got herself killed or disabled right here, then it was not only her doom, but the Doctor's as well.

So she couldn't afford even a small margin for error, because there had been no one she could tell. No one who, at best, wouldn't try to stop her by calling the police and having her hauled in "for her own good".

As she rested she thought, somewhat inanely, that when this was over, she was going to have to find out if the TARDIS had a gymnasium, and if not, if the Doctor might not feel like constructing one once he was feeling better. Rose liked the idea, not only because she had resolved to work on her climbing skills and upper body strength after this, but also if the Doctor had a project inside the TARDIS, it might be nice to perhaps stay home for just a little while, have a little break from adventuring. Not a big break, just a couple of days. Just enough that Rose could watch him for a while, make certain he was really all right…

She trembled where she clung to the rock, blaming it on the cold, but knowing it was because she was frightened about what she might find by the end of this climb.

Still, she knew she shouldn't complain, because just a few hours ago there was not even a cliff to climb.

* * *

The first start had been at the law office that belonged to two small-time lawyers whose names Rose hadn't bothered to learn. If she had walked toward the building with a stinging numbness from her experience in the shower, she was launched into warrior mode when she had to deal with the idiot secretary in the front reception area inside.

"What do you mean, there was no virus?!" she nearly shrieked at the little mousey woman.

In hindsight, Rose realized that being already emotionally unhinged meant that she was unable to deal with most situations tactfully. In the same hindsight, she also realized that just because the little woman blockaded behind tall, ominous monitors of different computers was dumpy and had glasses so thick she should have been able to see the other side of the moon didn't mean that she was supposed to be exceptionally bright.

Or brave since she nearly called the police in response to Rose's aggression. Summoned by the little woman's flustered squeaking, another little mousey person in thick glasses who could have been the woman's brother wandered from behind slightly larger monitors that were blinking in and out different colored helixes in what Rose guessed was some sort of screen saver.

Luckily for both women the man--who must have been one of the lawyers who owned the building, was much calmer. Aside from a rise in her already over-stimulated feelings of impatience and irritation because of his condescending tones, she did actually manage to have a sensible and believable conversation with him just before he offered to call the authorities to escort her wherever she needed to go.

Rose left the law office and skipped between a few buildings before ducking back inside the TARDIS. She sat on the floor with her back against the doors, thinking rapidly. She even allowed herself a few seconds to feel embarrassed by her behavior; it was no wonder they thought she was a crackpot! Still, finding the source of the virus and the area it had taken place and then ultimately disappeared--because surely the Doctor would have taken care of it in short over forty-eight years ago--was the first step that she needed. Indeed, it had been an obvious one that she simply hadn't seen before.

She had chosen to go to the office with her inquiries because it was the only "official" building that she knew of in a strange town in a strange country. Even though the building was a restaurant forty-eight years ago, of course it would have records predating that time. A deadly virus would tie lots of places and people with litigation, wouldn't it?

The mousey little man with his arms resting loosely in the pockets of his dark brown suit had repeated--in calmer and more reasonable tones than his female counterpart--that there had been no virus that she was describing. There was none on file, none on record, and a twenty-year-old girl insisting she damn well knew there had been a virus then when she couldn't possibly have been around at the time to insist with such authority needed to be escorted home to her parents and put to bed. …Well, that last part he didn't actually say, but it was all over his face.

Rose sat another moment, heartbeat slowing, and let another wave of heavy, crushing guilt flow over her. Once again she thought how things might have been different if only he could have trusted her to obey Rule One. If only he hadn't been so distracted that he had been paying closer attention to the settings he was entering into the TARDIS computer.

Still, there was no time for that. She had to think. To move. Maybe those lawyers didn't have as good of records as she guessed.

She went back out and asked directions to any hospitals in the area. She visited one run-down local clinic and also a huge main hospital that was two taxi-rides and a long walk away from the street where the TARDIS was parked. No one had ever heard of a virus. There was no record of a virus or anyone being affected by one of the symptoms Rose described in the last fifty years.

It was getting increasingly difficult to stay patient. Everywhere she turned, every soul she questioned gave her nothing but blankness. There was sympathy if she said she was looking for a missing person, but utter blankness when she described a virus. Forty-eight years was a long time, but a disease that had gotten the Doctor's attention would have to stick in a few memories…wouldn't it?

Later, Rose might have admitted perhaps she had finally gone a bit barmy before she saw it coming because found herself back on that same be-damned street randomly knocking on doors. In an attempt not to seem like a complete madwoman, she scraped her inquiries together in a cover story that was based enough on the truth that she might somehow get the actual answers that she needed.

Composed but allowing some of her worry to show through, Rose would show anyone who answered a door a picture of the Doctor on her phone. He was her friend, she said, and he had come to town to do research on a virus that his grandfather had been fighting in this area just short of fifty years ago, but he had disappeared.

Her heart would rise if she met anyone who looked to be over fifty years old, always adding that her friend in the picture bore a striking resemblance to his grandfather, hoping to invoke a memory of him then, hoping for a story, an anecdote, something, anything that could be a starting point for her to pick up the trail. She couldn't squelch the feeling that if she got even a spark of memory from anyone, it what start a ball rolling that she wouldn't be able to stop if she wanted to.

For hour after excruciating hour, with her body heavy under fatigue and desperation, and knuckles growing sore, Rose knocked on every door she could find, every shop, every home, every numbered apartment, every old town house door framed by crumbling stoops. Sometimes she recognized some of the same people she had spoken to on the street before, which was inevitable of course. Some reflected sympathy. Some had pity in their eyes. Some were indifferent, busy. Some were angry at being disturbed. Some were children who were, of course, incredibly unlikely to know anything useful. Some were chatty, prattling on about what the world was coming to and rumors of what happened to people who disappeared. Some were dismissive, didn't care. Some were interested and wanted to know more, but had nothing to tell her in return.

Rose's desperation began to turn into irritation and anger as the sun dipped low. It was a candle-weak flame, she knew, something that would burn for a bit, and then putter out. She knew this was her most idiotic idea yet. She thought she had known what she needed to do to trace the Doctor, but everywhere she turned, every person she asked, every place she looked was a dead end, and she knew better than any human in this town how big the planet and then the universe beyond it was. He _couldn't_ be far from here, and yet he could also be anywhere, and here she was walking around in circles running and running and running in the same circles like a hamster on a wheel! She needed a lead! Just one lead!

But…she knew it was time to give up for the day. She knew it would take weeks to ask every resident on the street, and she also knew she couldn't rap on doors and ring doorbells all night long.

She was in the middle of the street where two buildings were parted enough to allow a shallow alley that ended abruptly at a brick wall that was also the back of another building on the next street. There was just enough room for an old-fashioned skip. Rose absently reflected that some things didn't seem to change no matter how far she traveled into the future, such as human methods of waste disposal.

A very old man who couldn't possibly be younger than seventy wandered out of the alley. As unchanging as old metal skips were also the garb of the homeless and the destitute. The old man had once been broad and stocky, Rose could see, even with the indeterminable layers of clothing wrapped around his body.

On impulse, Rose strode toward him. It was his advanced age that drew her, one of the few people she had seen this evening who was old enough to have been here and remember something from forty-eight years ago.

And if he didn't, then she could at least give him the package of crackers she found in one of the Doctor's unsettlingly deep coat pockets as an apology for disturbing him.

No sooner had Rose Tyler taken out her mobile and produced a picture of the Doctor when it happened. A miracle that was almost worth the agony of the past few days.

The old homeless man plunged his hand into an inner pocket of his coat and drew out a gun, the barrel suddenly a paper's width away from the end of her nose. All without ever taking his bloodshot, olive-brown eyes off the little screen displaying the Doctor in Rose's palm.

"The _Doctor_," he spat.

There was a space between two heartbeats. In that tiny space of time between one heartbeat and the next, so much information could be taken in. So much could be felt. The man spoke the Doctor's name like a curse, a familiar mix of hatred and fear that Rose had heard many times from enemies of the Doctor.

The old man smelled of urine and whisky and old human oil and sweat and all manner of rot and waste and rancid and sour, and his tangled beard was caked with unidentifiable substances but…

The Doctor, he had said. And he had said it with _fresh_ hatred in his eyes. The Doctor, he said! One heartbeat, and Rose's entire being was absolutely renewed with hope.

In spite of everything, even the weapon shoved right in her face, Rose could have _kissed _him.


End file.
